Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37875
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

A feature of modern SF and fantasy is that readers are expected to tolerate not knowing the details of the world at the start, and to pick up these details as they go along. Instead of an info-dump at the start, the relevant information is presented more naturally as the story unfolds. This requires the reader to be more active, and as a result this can pull the reader deeper into your story.

The classic method is exposition to another character. Frequently you'll have one or more [audience surrogate](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AudienceSurrogate) characters who start ignorant of basically everything. As those characters learn more about the world, we learn with them. Often this character is also the lead character too, because that gives us a classic Hero's Journey, but it's not always the case - sometimes the lead character is the one dropping exposition on a sidekick.

This can be obvious, clunky and boring, as anyone who's read Dan Brown will know. But it can be done elegantly too, especially when the _way_ in which this is handled provides more background to the people concerned. In _Dune_, many interactions with the Bene Gesserit are infodumps, but the way the Bene Gesserit characters approach the situations and the way others react make them an essential part of the story. The infodump provides some detail, but simultaneously you're picking up characterisation and implied information about how the society works.

Sometimes you don't even get that, and you're expected to pick up smaller details as you go. Maybe you have an alien race whose appearance isn't explicitly described initially, because all the characters are familiar with them; but the details slowly emerge as things happen. You don't have to say "he's got tentacles instead of hands", you casually say "I transferred credits with a touch of finger to tentacle", for example.

It's also perfectly acceptable to start in media res, and drop short infodumps or timeline jumps as interludes. This is used pretty frequently by Neal Stephenson and Charles Stross, for two examples off the top of my head.

Original score: 5